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Forum:Sidebar templates
I know I'm going to step on toes with that, but whatever: we need to deal with what our various sidebar templates have become, and find a common direction in which we want to go from here. When first created, sidebar templates were meant to display the common information at a glance. "Common" meaning information that is available for a great majority of articles that would later use the sidebar, not "any information that at least one article of that type might contain". This is what sidebars have become by now - one of the worst offenders (not sure if the worst) is probably , which has parameters for weight, blood type and even captains woman (useable on exactly three articles!) on top of spouse. Besides their content, there are many other problems that I found when checking the various templates during the last days: tons of different parameter names serving the same function (image, image1, image-top, image-logo, logo, ...), sometimes non-matching parameter names (caption3 to serve as the caption of image2), very recently a new "formatting" parameter added to one of the templates (http://memory-alpha.org/en/index.php?title=Template:Sidebar_government&diff=1083684&oldid=1083112, which I think should not happen, because we're actually having templates so that an editor using them doesn't have to concern himself with formatting decisions), some sidebars using a red title bar at the top while others don't, some sidebars having visible image captions while others don't, some documentation page apparently not having been updated with the last changes to the template itself, and last but not least, several different coding styles internally, all trying to achieve the same, making it very difficult to just jump from one template to another for comparison. Now, this is just a rant for now, but maybe I can attract some other opinions already. What do you think should be contained in a sidebar, what layout do you prefer, etc. - anyway, I'm going to suggest my preferred style later. -- Cid Highwind 13:39, February 5, 2010 (UTC) :I think that the sidebars dealing with "Real world" stuff (novels, comics, bio books, ref books, and DVDs) are all pretty good and fairly consistent across the board. DarkHorizon and I spent a fair bit of time putting those together (all at the same time) and made a point of ensuring that they were all in line with each other (ie, similar variable names, formats, etc). :Of course, I think that Cid's really referring to the "in universe" template stuff, but I wanted to make a point of separating the two from each other. -- sulfur 14:10, February 5, 2010 (UTC) ::I think that the information in the sidebar should not make reading the article unneccesary- which the character template example seems to do. They should only have "name, rank, serial number" type information- the bare minimum common, basic information necessary to establish an introduction. --31dot 14:19, February 5, 2010 (UTC) (Re: sulfur) Yep - I haven't made that distinction while checking the various templates, but now that you mention it, I can only agree: I can't remember seeing any of the problems mentioned above in a "realworld sidebar". -- Cid Highwind 14:20, February 5, 2010 (UTC) :::I agree with that there is a problem with the sidebar images. Sidebar images should not replace regular article images, and certainly the gallery section doesn't need to be in the sidebar. With such long sidebars, the regular images in the article are all being pushed down. On the other hand, I don't agree so much about the data parameters, although some of them may be getting a little fat. If it takes a paragraph to explain the value in the sidebar, maybe it should just link to a section in the article that explains it fully. --bp 21:14, February 5, 2010 (UTC) ::::Since I made the switch change referenced above, I should at least explain it. See United Federation of Planets, Romulan Star Empire, and Empire, for what that change did. I hold the exact opposite view Cid has, in that these extra parameters aren't a problem, since at what point in a article are we going to list someones weight, or blood type? Is it going to be easy to find without reading the whole article? MA is used as a resourse for authors, and not just of the fanon kind, so the sidebar should contain every detail that an author would need short of reading the article. Let's be honest, guy's never going to stop hearing from fans if he gets someone's blood type wrong. ::::I fully agree with standardizing the image and caption calls, but once again I fail to see how letting someone make a choice is the end of the world here. These templates are great at standardizing the look of MA while reducing the amount of code on each page, and that's all well and good, but at what point did it become about the user base is too stupid to be be trusted to make a choice? - 21:38, February 5, 2010 (UTC) ::::Also, the current will not have that many images when it's finalized, so no need to fear sidebars with six images. :) - 21:46, February 5, 2010 (UTC) ::::While the sidebars may have been created with the purpose of being used on the most 'common' articles, they have since then changed to become all inclusive, so there aren't any articles excluded. Turning back the clock on these would serve as much purpose as turning back the clock on MA altogether. Much like the subject we are covering, we should be striving to be more inclusive instead of more exclusive. - 22:31, February 5, 2010 (UTC) Picking just one single "extra parameter" and asking "what harm does it do" is somewhat misrepresenting the underlying issue. The problem is not one little factoid that we simply don't know where else to address - it's one, and another, and some more, and last but not least yet another one on top of it - and all of a sudden, the sidebar has become longer than the article it should accompany (instead of replace). Similarly, claiming that "the authors" need the sidebar as a source for research can't be the whole truth. If, for example, blood type was mentioned somewhere in the article (where, by the way, it would still belong even if it is contained in the article - sidebar information should never replace information in the article, but summarize the most important facts from the article), a simple text search would bring it up. Claiming that "the authors" will just read the summary (=sidebar), and not the whole thing, if that character and his blood type are central to the story they write, paints them as totally lazy - something I think couldn't be farther from the truth. -- Cid Highwind 12:15, February 7, 2010 (UTC) ::::I would say that the point that these extra parameters are making the sidebars too long is also somewhat misrepresenting, as I don't know of a single page that has a sidebar that's longer than the article because these. Worf has the longest sidebar I know of, and it doesn't use any of the options you mentioned, except spouse. I couldn't even tell you what pages use 'height' and 'weight', though I have to assume that at least one does, but I'm willing to bet 50 MA points that the sidebar won't be longer than the article there because of that information. - 20:06, February 7, 2010 (UTC) :::::Height and weight are used on Roberta Lincoln and Harcourt Mudd at least. Neither has an overly-large sidebar.– Cleanse ( talk | ) 00:30, February 8, 2010 (UTC) :::Out of curiosity, what is the longest sidebar? --bp 05:19, February 8, 2010 (UTC) ::::Based on text or images? Out of the in-universe articles, I would say Worf takes the cake for text, though Alexander Rozhenko comes close with images. Real world would be any of the . - 05:26, February 8, 2010 (UTC) :::Worf's massive TOC helps with the long sidebar, but obviously that character has been thoroughly explored in Trek. ;) --bp 05:40, February 8, 2010 (UTC) :::Here is a thing that might be relevant: User:DYKBot/sidebar template parameter usage. --bp 10:09, February 8, 2010 (UTC) :I fixed the "broken" entries in your list bp. Just fyi. -- sulfur 11:57, February 8, 2010 (UTC) ::Good Job. --bp 12:20, February 8, 2010 (UTC) Parameter reform idea Hey kids! Here's bp with a crazy idea that i've been talking about with Cid in IRC, and he hates it so I must go forward with it... Consider these three ways one might add data to a sidebar template: Way 1 | mother = mommy | father = pappy | siblings = sissy (sister) brohem (brother) Way 2 | mother = mommy | father = pappy | sibling1 = sissy | siblingtype1 = sister | sibling2 = brohem | siblingtype2 = brother Way 3 | family = So, I propose that we look into doing it more of the third way. There is alot of way 1, which I hate because the data has HTML mixed in which looks crappy and is harder to maintain, and it can't be parsed in a meaningful way. The second way is by far the worst, and it limits us to the number of parameters that have been added to the template. Way 3 preserves all the semantic information, is easy to parse, and is infinitely extensible without changing the core template. Here are some other examples where this would be good: In we could replace arc1title, arc1prev, arc1next... etc with: | arcs = And consider very generic things like "status" that appear in multiple sidebars, we could have a template for a log of status changes. For example in we have status, datestatus that only allows for the most recent status. | history = And status could be used for other things like rank promotions for people. It works any sidebar where something may change status! Anyway, I think there is some really good benefits to doing things like this. I think it will clean up the clutter of some of the sidebars, and actually reduce the code that goes into them both in the templates themselves and in the template calls. --bp 12:19, February 8, 2010 (UTC) :Well, if Cid hates it I all for it. :) :But seriously, I do like the idea of unrestricting parts of the templates, as long as it is conceivably easier to use afterwards. At the very least the third family suggestion is a vast improvement over the current system, and I'm sure that Worf would agree. - 13:04, February 8, 2010 (UTC) I think the sub-templates should be as generic as possible to get the most usage. Like status is , maybe instead of it should be . That could be used for many more relationships. In a person sidebar though, it would still be "| family = .". I've updated my original post slightly to reflect that. --bp 13:15, February 8, 2010 (UTC)